Byung-Chul Han Quotes

When power is separated from any communicative context, it becomes naked violence.

In the empire of signs, the soul, psychology, is erased. There is no soul to infect the holy seriousness of ritual play.

The reason that people take selfies is not narcissism. Rather, it is inner emptiness. There is no meaning to stabilize the ego. Faced with its inner emptiness, the ego constantly produces itself.

Violence and freedom are the two endpoints on the scale of power.

Power turns pure being into a having.

Pornography completes the deritualization of love.

However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom--that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement. Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation.

Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence.

Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified.

Power is never naked. Rather, it is eloquent.

Power is not opposed to freedom. It is precisely freedom that distinguishes power from violence or coercion.

In contrast to festivals, events do not create community.

Ritual society is a society of rules. It is based not on virtues but on a passion for rules.

Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things.

The haste of day rules over the night as empty form.